Lollapalooza music festival coming to Israel

(JTA) — Israel will become the third international location for the Lollapalooza music festival.

Lollapalooza Israel will take place Aug. 20-22, 2013 at Tel Aviv’s Yarkon Park, the music festival’s organizers said last weekend.

In a video published on the festival’s official website, Perry Farrell, the festival’s creator as well as the lead singer for Jane’s Addiction, said that during a recent visit to Israel, he saw an “international music community that listens to everything we all listen to, but the artists weren’t traveling there so it was an opportunity.”

Lollapalooza launched in 1991 as a farewell tour for Jane’s Addiction before settling down in Chicago’s Grant Park in 2005. In the last two years the festival was held in Chicago as a weekend event, and is planning to continue having the Windy City as its U.S. home in addition to its international expansion thus far in Chile and Brazil, and next year in Tel Aviv.

"Israel is an incredibly sophisticated music market," Marc Geiger of Lollapalooza partner WME Entertainment said, Rolling Stone magazine reported. "Consumers have a voracious appetite for entertainment, yet there has never been a major music festival. To me, this combination screams Lollapalooza.”